When Ben Horowitz and his partner Mark Andrewsson came into the venture capital industry, it was very different than it is today. You can argue that it is them more than almost anyone else that has reshaped this industry and matured it so much ever since. And recent Horowitz has become one of the most important institutions, not just investors, but institutions, in the private investing landscape, having achieved a scale that no one thought was possible in venture, which was always supposed to be this small, tiny niche corner of the world. This conversation is a bit unique relative to some of the other ones that Ben has had more recently. I tried to understand what the shaping forces and influences in his life and the ways that he thinks America most needs to change.
He's taken this as his life's mission to build a firm that affects outcomes in the country, not just in a small niche part of the market, but very broadly. Even having discussions in this conversation about his work with, say, the Las Vegas Police Department, which he's tried to infuse with technology to lower crime rates across the system. I hope you enjoyed this great and wide-ranging conversation with Ben Horowitz. I think a fun place to begin, Ben, would be your take on the state of the country. What does it feel like to you? In 2026, I know part of your mission is to directly impact the trajectory of the country. We'll talk about that a lot.
But begin with what does the landscape, the playing field feel like to you today? I think the tech sector is very, very healthy. America's competitiveness is very, very good. Entrepreneurship culture is outstanding. That's the main thing I look at from my lens. If you look at, and I go all over the world and everybody wants Silicon Valley, how can we have Silicon Valley in the UK? How can we have it in France? The thing that I would say lacking, so they have a lot of the ingredients. They have great talent. They've got great universities. They have definitely a worse regulatory environment, an EU increasingly bad regulatory environment for entrepreneurship.
But there's a cultural challenge where succeeding, doing something larger than yourself, making the world a better place. Those aren't things that young people feel like society values. The likelihood, if you're building a company of getting people to work for you and dedicate their life to a mission like that, it's just not that great. Whereas in the US, it's amazing. I think the economy is in much better shape than people realize. Why? Start to see that. We've done a lot of things to stimulate it. We've got lower energy prices. We've got much less regulation. We've got more user friendly tax code. That's all starting to kick in now.
From our perspective, I think the bigger thing is AI is it's going to impact everything. There's almost no problem you can think of that you can't go. Well, we have a real shot at solving that with AI. It's from what were the big problems in the US auto-desk. We've got an AI solution for that cancer. We have an AI solution for that. The fact that we've got a technology where we can address everything is a real new phenomenon. I think in a fairly major way over the next 12 to 24 months. Why do you think 12 to 24 months is a timeframe worth mentioning that some of this stuff will start to be felt more broadly? It's all starting to take effect now.
It's got to roll out, get deployed. Now, deployments of technology in particular in the past have taken a long time. You had to build out the infrastructure to do it. For cars, you need things like roads and traffic lights and all that kind of thing. For the internet, you needed fiber in the ground and people to have smartphones. You needed to do a lot just to get going. The internet is here. If you want to use AI, if you want to apply it to your business, you just do it. There is no infrastructure that needs to be built to adopt the thing. What could most interrupt this good trajectory that America is on, where we are building solutions using technology? What are the biggest risks?
I think policy. One of the things my father said to me was a bad government. No matter how many smart people you have, no matter how great a culture you have, no matter how great the country is, can ruin the whole thing. Venezuela was the fourth richest country in the world. Crazy. Then communism and that's that. If you look at how little comes out of so many of these countries in Europe that have so many smart people and the ones that went to communism, and there are so many genius, Romanian entrepreneurs, John Von Neumann and the number of great genius scientists that came out of Hungary like this little country.
Then it was just gone once a communist took over. It was completely like nothing, from inventing everything to nothing overnight. I think that that can absolutely happen here. We could outlaw AI. I think there were pretty aggressive proposals. The last Biden administration executive order said that you could not sell a GPU without federal government approval. That was a real executive order and I got reversed. We were that close to being basically out of the global chip game. So it is fragile. By the way, technology solutions work much better than policy solutions. That's the other thing. Policy solutions is very hard to make anything work.
So if you think about COVID, we could tell everybody's staying their house. Well, that's got some extremely bad side effects. It turned out not to work that well. Or we could invent a drug that cures it or a vaccine that works. It's just hard to have a policy solution. All the policy stuff on climate change. Europe actually reduced emissions and all that, but it didn't do anything because China didn't reduce emissions. But if you build a technology or really a safe nuclear efficient or a nuclear fusion facility, then that would have a big effect.
And I think in general, that's true. In police like Defund the Police did not make anybody safe for technology does. If you really want to change the world, if you really want to make it a better place, I think you can build a solution for a dining or anything. If you want to change the world for the better, it's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. I was with a local restaurant tour yesterday here in New York, one of the best, for a couple hours having him describe to us how he is planning on using AI tooling to improve everything about his restaurant business.
How do you think about the way all of this is changing the sort of potentially large attractive businesses that you want to invest in because there's been six things. With the restaurant example, toast is a great, many great companies that have been built in and around restaurant software businesses. It seems like this restaurant owner is going to be able to have his own spun up operating system specific to him. Not going to need any of that stuff. How does this changing the way in which you view investment opportunities?
On the positive, one, everything is up for grabs. I think people are kind of overreacting to that in the stock market and so forth. If you look at existing software companies, people think they're all dead. Some of these guys are extremely hard targets. It's not that easy to take out sales for a SRSAP. You would be surprised even with AI. Like how much heavy lifting that is. Having said that, it is true that a lot of these things, yeah, you can just make your own. You can do it yourself. It's going to be a lot easier.
That's just like the number of possible interesting companies I think went up a lot. I think the other thing we're seeing is the products work so much better than any technology products we've seen in the past. Revenue growth is so much faster for these AI companies. There's many such cases of companies coming out. Cursor, which is ostensibly an IDE. What's the biggest IDE before Cursor? I don't know, but it wasn't big. It took probably 12 or 15 years to get to that revenue level. They went over a billion dollars in revenue in no time.
That's super interesting. I would say, though, from an investing standpoint, the laws of physics of company building changed, which is going to affect investing in what's currently, I would say, an unknown way. If you look at the one thing you knew if you'd ever built a software company, is you cannot throw money at the problem. What's a man-year 700 IBMers before lunch? That phenomenon, kind of everything was built on because you knew if somebody built a great product and it took them three years and they did it with a small team, Google's not going to hire 2,000 engineers and catch them.
It's just not going to happen. That was a lot of physics. Now, if you have the data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve, damn near anything. We've seen that with Elon catching the big models in no time. He just took a lot of money and a really good data center design and some smart engineers. He's in the game. He got in the game very fast. That would have never happened in the past. The markets are also seem to be much, much, much bigger than anything we've ever seen.
It would cause you to think about valuations and long-term value and other sorts of things in a different way than we have in the past. On the one hand, it's like, well, when you calculate the long-term value, but if this market wasn't $50 billion, what if it was $5 trillion? Then, on the other hand, what if somebody could catch you? These are just concepts we've not dealt with. How would the conversations feel different to me if I came in? You've got all these great investors working at Andrews and Horowitz. The nature of the conversation amongst your teammates as they're debating this sort of stuff versus four years ago or something. Where does it feel most materially different internally?
I would say one of the most different things is when you look at AI researchers, it is really a different kind of thing. If you haven't been at Google or Facebook or OpenAI or Anthropic and somebody gave you hundreds of millions of dollars to try and build a giant model and you were one of the main people, then you probably don't know how to do it because you can't learn it in school. You can't learn it in school because it's a little bit alchemistic in nature. It's a little bit of an art. If you've never done it before, the chance of, on your very first try, building some kind of large model that it's going to work well, isn't that great? Now, people are coming up to speed more. There's more companies. People are learning it.
But that's kind of why you got to this, which from the outside world, probably like absolutely bananas that, well, why is somebody paying a hundred million dollars for an AI research or a billion dollars for an AI research? That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. Well, what if there were only 40 of them like in the world? You have a $14,000. Yeah. Then it changes the math on it a little bit. I think that's sort of where we were because it's kind of the first time we've had a need for a technologist that academia can produce. That is kind of probably one of the bigger things that change in the conversation is like who are all these people?
Like we track all of them and know what they're doing, but it's very different. Your finance team isn't losing money on big mistakes. It's leaking through a thousand tiny decisions nobody's watching. Ramp puts guardrails on spending before it happens. Real-time limits, automatic rules, zero firefighting. Try it at ramp.com slash invest. Every investment firm is unique and generic AI doesn't understand your process. Rogo does. It's an AI platform built specifically for Wall Street connected to your data, understanding your process and producing real outputs. Check them out at rogo.ai slash invest.
The best AI and software companies from open AI to cursor to perplexity use work OS to become enterprise ready overnight, not in months. Visit work OS.com to skip the unglamorous infrastructure work and focus on your product. Everyone talks in venture about the parallel. The thing underneath the parallel is a sort of inequality. It seems like so many of the things that are happening are just massive multipliers on the trend of inequality in every way, the billion dollar researcher, the size of the biggest companies, the wealth of the people creating those companies.
从 Open AI 到 Cursor 再到 Perplexity,最优秀的人工智能和软件公司都使用 Work OS,以便在短时间内(而不是几个月内)做好企业准备。访问 WorkOS.com,跳过繁琐的基础设施工作,专注于您的产品。在风险投资领域,人们常谈论“平行”现象。下面潜藏的是一种不平等。似乎许多正在发生的事情都在各方面放大了不平等趋势,比如数十亿美元的研究项目、最大公司的规模,以及创造这些公司的人的财富。
I would argue that inequality is a feature not a bug of the American system, but I'm curious for you to riff on the nature of growing inequality and the good and the bad associated with that. What's happening in AI is sort of, I would just say an extension of the Kobe Bryant effect, which is a basketball player and whenever James J. Nase Smith invented the game, there was a limited amount of money you could make because you basically played the game in front of the people who could show up for the game. And that was it. That's a whole market.
Whereas once you add television and the global audience and some of these kinds of things, you can get to much bigger, you can be LeBron James. You can become a billionaire. That was not at all possible before. We first saw that with the internet where okay, now I can build a product and I can get to global distribution very fast, then all the sun that I can become extremely rich. And then AI is another layer on top of that and that okay, now take that same product and make it just more valuable thing. And so whoever invents that is whatever the internet company was plus plus plus. And so that's going to make them even richer.
That's the kind of bad part of it. But I think the good part of it is it starting out day one, like completely democratized. Like the AI, anybody gets access to like very powerful AI. Anybody has a phone and now everybody, most people in the world at this point have smartphones. And now you've got like super intelligence in your phone. So that's a big, it's an equalizer of the opportunity in a lot of ways that I don't think we've ever seen a bigger opportunity equalizer than AI in that every child can have like a super advanced, amazing tutor teacher. So like education, great education is accessible to all. Now, so I think it's an equalizing technology and you know, there's some drive in any quality.
This is another thing I learned from my father. He said, look, son, life isn't fair. And that's extremely good advice because it's just not going to be fair. Like no matter what government or anything tries to do, it's not going to be fair. And the problem is if you create a system that tries to correct that, it doesn't make things more fair. It just transfers all the power to the person running the system. And that's what happened with Stalin. That's what happened with Chuchesky. That's what happened with Pol Pot. That's what happened with Mao. You know, not an accident that every single system like that went bad because it really ends up just being a power transfer. When you think about, well, what do you want?
You'd like everybody to have a chance. You know, like, don't give me no chance. Give me some chance. Now, it may not be as big a chance as the other guy. It may not be, you know, like a perfect chance. But if I have the desire, if I've got some capability, give me a chance to be something like to make my imprint on the world. And a system like that is going to end up with a lot of inequality. Oh, by the way, all systems end up with a lot of inequality. But you can try systematically to give everybody an opportunity. I think AI does a really good job of that. One of the memes that's very popular today is that you have a couple of years to get some capital or you're going to be a part of the permanent underclasses like the phrase that he's used on Twitter.
And I certainly agree that now everyone has the best lawyer, accountant, you know, advisor in their pocket. And that's amazing. But what do you think about this notion that we're just going to, because of that, we need less labor. We need, it's going to be harder if you don't have some capital to begin with to accumulate capital and break in. I don't necessarily believe them. I'm just curious what you think about challenges will face because of AI, societally. Yeah, I don't really think that's right. I think that I don't think like the door is going to close behind you. I think like the opportunity is sent to multiply when you kind of open up a new door and open up like a new way of doing things.
We saw that with crypto. So many people who made money on crypto were like people who you know literally didn't have much to start with. They just got into the technology early. And then they kind of parlayed it up. And so if you have something that grows really fast, that's actually the opportunity for somebody with a little bit of capital to make a lot of money because it doesn't take much. You know, if you bought Bitcoin for a nickel, you did really well. And all you needed was a nickel. And that's, you know, I think that's the nature of these things that go hyperbolic. And you know, particularly if you create something.
I also think the labor market stuff, I think people are acting as though it's very predictable and when it's not at all predictable. So if you look at kind of the history of the world and automation, and this is what it is, it's kind of like an automation technology, we've been automating things since the agricultural days. And in those days, I think 95 or 96% of all jobs in the US were agriculture. Almost all those jobs have been eliminated. And the jobs we have now, the people doing agriculture wouldn't even consider jobs. And so like the idea that we could imagine all the jobs that are going to come, you know, sitting here, you know, that AI is going to enable.
I think as low, I think the need for like more creativity jobs is going to go way up and kind of need for kind of jobs to process work for the creatives will probably go down in some ways. But I'm not even sure about that. You know, we've had AI going, right, ImageNet was what 2012 and then natural language stuff in Burton, all that was like 2015 and then you know, Chatsy BT was 2022 and like, where's all the job destruction? You know, why isn't it happened yet? And why are you so fucking sure it's going to happen next? And why are you so sure? No jobs are going to be created.
I don't think it's nearly as predictable as people are saying. How would you describe the nature and scope of your ambition over the next 10, 20 years? One of the things that I learned, so I had a mentor is a great great CEO by the name Andy Grove and he was the CEO of Intel and he kind of famously did the major pivot of them out of the memory business into the micro process or business. Maybe the greatest tech CEO we've had. And one of the things that he said that, you know, in a way is very obvious, but I think is also profound is if you're the leader in the industry, then the growth of the industry is dependent on you. Like you, it's up to you to expand the market. Like nobody else is going to do it.
And so when I think about the firm, I think about a lot in those terms, the reason America is America and there's many narratives on this, but like I think the factual one is like we won the industrial revolution. We really did. We had Henry Ford and we had Thomas Edison. We had like great entrepreneurs. They built great technology, the technology lead, like to military lead, lead to economically, lead to cultural dominance. None of that was by accident and had we not had all those inventions, had all those companies which led to, you know, everything from like winning World War II. We just want to be, we'd be some other thing. We wouldn't be America.
So where they're again, like this is the equivalent change of the industrial revolution in terms of how everything works, government, societies, businesses, and you know, we're either going to be the leader of that technology, the provider of that technology, or we're not. And if we're not, we're not going to be the economic superpower, the military superpower, the cultural influence, the kind of standard of the world that we are now. At least I think that would be bad. I think, America's been kind of good for the world and good for giving people a chance like we talked about before. And so our role in that, you know, you know, taking a try and be humble with the role, but our role is like from a policy standpoint, from a funding standpoint, from helping people build standpoint, to make sure that that next set of great companies comes out of America.
Allied nations, a core ambition is to do our part in kind of helping them. I want to ask about some of the ingredients to do that well, but just as a quick sidebar on Andy Grove, his book is incredible. Like everyone should read High Output Management. What was it about? What's very specifically, did you learn from him? Like what did you see him do that impacted the way that you think or behave? Well, like I'm so overly influenced by him. It's hard to even pin it down, but so High Output Management, you know, I actually wrote the new forward for it, which I actually think that's the best thing I've ever wrote was a forward to High Output Management.
But the hard thing about the reason I wrote that forward was, you know, it was my favorite book, and I wrote the hard thing about hard things was basically intended to be the updated version of it, but the thing in High Output Management that he did so well that I tried to, you know, kind of do my own version of is, you know, the concepts of management are easy. Like, you'd need an eighth grade education maybe to kind of understand management. It's not like physics. It's pretty simple, but the psychological part of it is extremely difficult, particularly for a young person to be able to do. You know, it's super confrontational. You're having to kind of look through the conversation you're having to the entire organization.
You really have to be confusion at times. The good of the of the whole super seats, the good of the individual. And all these things are really complicated to do. His big influence on me was me trying to not only absorb that, but then kind of tell it in a more up-to-date kind of modern way. I went to visit him. He had this award on the wall, which was it was literally like manager of the year from for the Santa Clara facility of Intel. And it was from I don't know 1992. I'm like, handy. You were like the biggest CEO in the world. Like, why did they give you the manager of the year award for the Santa Clara facility?
And he goes, oh, man, he's like, you know, Santa Clara was like always scored like there was the lowest quality scores, the lowest fucking score on everything at Intel. And so I was just like, I'm going over there and talk to them. So I go over there. And he said, I brought a roll of toilet paper and I put it under my desk under my chair. And you know, I said like, when are you going to get this facility up to code? And they just started in with all this bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, and I fucking reached under my chair, put off the toilet paper, I said, clean up your bullshit and tell me when the fuck you're going to be up to code. And in two months they were up to code, and they were always the highest rated facility thereafter, you know, just on that. So they gave them manager of the year for that.
When did you first experience the lessons that drove his success, this confrontational, psychologically difficult aspect of management yourself? How would you encourage other people to like get it, get a taste of it? They can't just read about it, obviously. What happens to founders is you invent something, right? Now I've got to build a company. You don't know what you're doing and you make mistakes. And then those mistakes really cost the company and you lose confidence. And that leads you to hesitate. And that hesitation is what kind of causes the failure mode.
So then either like the company is into size of her, they get very open. All these guys got so open to input from their team and their executives. And like, but you know, the team doesn't have the full context. Only the leaders got the context. So even if they're smarter than you, you still likely can have better judgment because you have all the knowledge. But they defer. And then if you defer to people who work for you, then that kind of creates a weird political situation because people jump into the vacuum of like, you're not making a decision, I'll make the decision. And then that feels political to everybody else. And so that's the pattern people run into.
And so you really kind of have to build up enough confidence in them to have that confrontation. The hardest version of this, by the way, is the reorg because reorg is basically your redistributing power to make the company work better, to like have communication be better, to not have as much conflict. But what's going to happen is somebody who's really good, who you've had for a long time is going to lose power. And they're going to be fucking pissed. And so then if you compromise the organization so they can maintain their power, then you've just kind of redistributed power from the people doing all the work to the executives. And that's a catastrophe.
So it's always that kind of thing where people don't want to have that conference confrontation. They don't want to tell that person, look, the organizations here, you helped us tell here, but like you either have to be happy in this new role or it's going to be a rap. When you're young and in experience, you know what's going to hurt to like tell him that. But I don't know it's going to help me to do this reorg because I don't, I'm not experienced enough to know that. I've never done that before. And so I'm going to go with no, no, no void hurt to the, to the theoretical avoid hurt. And that's when you wreck your company.
And so that's the pattern. And I always do my best to like lend them my experience on that. You were lucky that when you started the injuries in Horowitz, you and Mark had both had tons of operating experience both together. Yeah, still didn't know what I was doing. Fair enough. And he didn't know what he was doing either. Like his ideas. Now like if you ask Mark about management now, like he's so different than how he actually did it. And it actually makes him mad if you talk about it too much because he's like, I got such bad fucking advice. If they told me to hire all these guys.
I think it's most different. Like what would he say is, or what do you observe to him to be the most different? I just think he's like way more in control of his like Mark is super emotional person. And he's just way more in control of it than he was then just in terms of just like the personality. He used to be like zero or a hundred, right? Like so he would be like full of motion. Like what the fuck are we doing? Or like I'm just not going to say anything. Like but nothing in between something.
I know the least about about your firm is like the first, I don't know what period of time. Three days, three months, three years. And I'd love to hear about how you thought about the business right as it was getting started. Of course we're going to come back to what it is now. And those ingredients you mentioned for having the impact you want to have. But lots of this is an incredible part of the world. So convali Wall Street, you know, these are institutions that make America great. Lots of people listening have ambitions to do this sort of thing.
And I'd love to hear like the very, very early, primordial case study of what it was like and what kinds of conversations you were having and what your initial ideas were. So venture capital, first of all, you kind of have to understand the context of it was there hadn't really been new top tier venture capital firms. So like the last one before we started that you'd say as top tier was probably benchmark, which ostensibly started in 1995. But it didn't really because all those guys came from another firm, Carl Merrill Pickard.
And that firm was like from the 80s. And there hadn't really been a new one from the 80s. And if you looked at why every VC was kind of reputation based. And so to be top tier, you had to have invested in Apple and Cisco and Google and you know Yahoo and all the great companies. And you can't from a standing start get to that. And then if you're not top tier in VC, you're not going to last because yeah, in a super hot period everybody makes money. But the best entrepreneurs will only work with the top tier firms because that's how you're going to recruit great engineers.
That's how you're going to get follow on money like everything comes out of that. So you'd never take money from a tier two if you could get it from tier one. And so that's why the tier one's always had better returns. So we knew we had to be tier one, but we had that problem. And the idea that we had was well venture capital is a great product for LPs. But it's not a great product for entrepreneurs. And so if we could build a better product for entrepreneurs, then we could win.
And that was like the original kind of framework. And the idea that we had for the product for entrepreneurs was you know, because we had been entrepreneurs was around what you and I had been talking about, which is well, if you're like a founder who wants to run their own company, you're not getting much. Like you need so much you don't have the confidence, you don't have the knowledge, you don't have the know how you don't have the network. What if we built a firm that like was designed to give you enough confidence, power, network reach, advice that you could actually be a CEO.
那就是最初的框架。我们对创业者产品的想法源于我们的创业经历。就是说,如果你是一个想要经营自己公司的创始人,你往往会发现自己得不到太多支持:你需要很多东西——比如信心、知识、技巧和人脉,而这些你可能都缺乏。那么我们是否可以创建一个公司,专门为你提供足够的信心、力量、人脉、建议,让你真正能够成为一名 CEO 呢?
And so that was the whole idea behind the firm originally. And then the second idea we had, which was the other thing like VCs didn't ever market themselves at all. Because if you're all based on your investing track record, it's best that it's just magic. Like why say anything? Like keep that a secret. And so they weren't talking. And so when we went out and talked like everybody covered it. So we instantly everybody knew we had this product.
Where did that, where did the germ of that specific idea come from? Like let's be fairly loud relative to what others do from the beginning. Well, it's funny because you know, Mark and I were talking about it. He said to me, he's like, why don't VCs market? And actually the original thing went all the way back to kind of the first class of VCs, which were the investor, the industrial revolution VCs were JP Morgan, Rothschild, Goldman Sachs, etc. Right?
Like they were the ones financing these things. And it turned out that these guys were financing both sides of World War II. And so they really didn't want any publicity because that would have been like an extremely fucking bad thing. To large extent that just carried over all the way through Arthorac and all these things. And then the reputation thing clicked in and it was working so there was no need to do it.
And we got a lot of criticism when we did it. Or LPs would say, you know, like the other VCs say, you guys are ego maniacs. You name the firm after yourself. You're marketing like this. And it was so funny because the reason we named the firm after ourselves is when we tried, we raised money in 2009, which is right on the edge of the financial crisis. And the big objection from LPs was, well, like you guys are like really good entrepreneurs. You're just going to leave this thing and go build another company and then we're going to be stuck with the fund.
And we couldn't get them off of that. And so then I had the idea. I was like, well, why don't we just name it with our names and then they know we're safe. And that worked. As your business grows Vanta scales with you, automating compliance and giving you a single source of truth for security and risk. Learn more at vanta.com slash invest. Rigline is redefining asset management technology as a true partner, not just to software vendor. They've helped firms 5x in scale enabling faster growth, smarter operations and a competitive edge. Visit ridgelineapps.com to see what they can unlock for your firm.
If you think about the the period of takeoff of the firm in 2009, up until you reach, let's call it like cruising altitude. Like when was cruising altitude? And and and what was the most difficult part about getting it from takeoff to that point? Well, I mean, the first thing is we really didn't know that much about investing. Mark and I had done some angel investing, but we'd not neither said any venture capital experience. And like, you know, credit to Sequoia, credit to, you know, Graylock and and and Cliner and all the guys who are around at that time.
Yeah, they just had years and years of doing it. We made more than our fair share of investing mistakes, you know, missing things we should have done and and then, you know, doing things we should have done. But missing things that we should have done was probably the bigger one and, you know, and then the other thing is is that kind of how we thought about the profile of the investor was wrong. So we so over indexed on our idea that we had to help the founder become a CEO that we made it a requirement that you couldn't be an investor at Andrews and Horowitz if you hadn't like founded and or run a company.
And that, you know, was very good attitude and set the culture of the firm in a lot of ways and had good things that came from it. But I would just say that like most CEOs aren't as interested in investing as they think they are. And then also most CEOs aren't as good at helping somebody else learn the job. And so those two things ended up being, you know, not quite correct. So we made some adjustments. You know, fun one just went really well because we, you know, we hit the scene hard.
It was a small fund. We did Skype. We did Slack. We did. I mean, like there was Stripe was in there like so like there were just too many good things and a $300 million fund for that thing that below the doors off. Fun too wasn't as good as one. And then by the time we got to three, that's when we had the contention among like, oh, we really don't have the right profile for GP here. And there was a while where we thought that was going to be a terrible fun.
I didn't know about being a great fun because we had, you know, Coinbase and Databricks and Lyft and GitHub. But that one was scary for a while. But coming out of that, we kind of knew what the firm needed to be. And so I think it was settled down after that, you know, it wasn't such a like startup. It was like, okay, we got across that chasm. But then the bigger thing was we always had this idea about software is eating the world. And you know, which is Mark articulated really well in his 2011 piece.
And so we always felt like venture capital firms needed to be able to scale. And the other firms would have trouble scaling because of the way they worked, the way they shared control. So that could be an opportunity for us. But we hadn't figured out how to do it yet. And then I'd say starting with like the bio and the crypto fund, I started to get to the kind of organizational picture of how we would become, be able to address every market of technology. And but with investing teams that weren't 20 people, like that doesn't work.
So you need an investing team of like four or five people, but you have to, you can't address the whole technology market with five people. So you have to have multiple teams. Having multiple teams in a venture capital firm is a little bit of a novel idea, particularly when each team has like a platform that helps the founder build the company. And so we began it really in earnest with the crypto fund, I think, like around 2018. And then, and you know, now the whole firm is kind of organized that way.
If you think, if we zoom now to today and back to what you said, which is that the scope of your ambition is big, as the leader, be the one to help or be the ones that are expanding the market, what are the components of doing that? Like what is the system need that it doesn't currently have that you might be able to provide? One is that the capital markets have changed, you know, dramatically with not much help. So I went public at 18 months old with $2 million in trailing revenue.
That wasn't a good idea, but companies used to go public routinely with $50 million in revenue. It was fine. You know, now nobody's going public. A billion, right? Like you get to go public or something like that. And you're kind of small if you don't have that. And so you kind of need a lot more out of the private markets than VCs are built to do. And so, you know, that's one of the kind of things we have to think about.
Another one is the companies in the portfolio, you know, they'd leave you at a hundred million revenue. They're going public. They're out to the racist. Well, that's not true anymore. And so what do you need when you get to be 200 million, 300 million revenue? Well, you need to be multi product. You need to be multi channel. You need to be multi geography. So as a venture firm, you know, we need to help them. And as a venture industry, we need to help them do that. Like how do I get to Japan? How do I get to South America? Like most venture firms don't provide much along those lines.
So we kind of have to step up to those ideas if we're going to have companies in the portfolio at that stage. Do you hope that over time you're forming? Maybe some others like it that have become these big institutions and venture. Go on to be sort of like the blackstone, you know, Apollo type companies that are big, publicly traded, you know, enduring businesses.
A big, huge wave among venture capitalists is private equity AI rollups. It's a good business idea. Like a really good business idea, which is, okay, you know, just like the spreadsheet kind of created the original private equity business. AI is kind of creating a new private equity business where you can buy any existing company, optimize it with AI and it'll be more valuable. That's a good idea. It's a good thing to invest in. It's not something we're going to do for two reasons.
One, it's like the cultural opposite of who we are. So we're about building new things, growth, believing in the entrepreneur, price doesn't even matter as long as the thing succeeds, you're going to do well. Private equity is like entry price is key. Like the, I mean, you know, I had a great dinner with Mark Rowan, who's a super genius, runs Apollo, and he was like entry price, entry price, entry price. You know, we never even think about that. We think about it, but it's not like first and foremost at all, like thinking about containing costs and this and that. The other, that's just not like what a good venture capital frame of mind is.
So like culturally, I didn't want to mix those two things, but more than that, like I just didn't want to be in a business where the way you make money is you figure out how to optimize an existing thing and, you know, lay off people and that kind of thing. We're about like new technology companies building the future, taking things forward, and I'll leave that to the other smart guys in the industry.
What if any trade-offs feel like they might exist at this scale as you continue to scale as you consider all these different people you're trying to serve well. The investors, internally, the LPs, the founders, so many people need to, nothing's perfect. Like what are the trade-offs to the path that you've chosen? I think, you know, with any scale of organization, you really have to overpay attention to culture or the culture will drift.
We probably spend more work on that than any venture capital firm. I'm going to like, you're not allowed to join unless you sign the culture document. I spend an hour with every single employee teaching them the culture, like it's like that level of investment. And then, you know, we really try to enforce it hard when we can. And, you know, we have pretty good consistency, but like that's that is hard to maintain as you grow.
Can you teach me more about culture? You've written a book about it. You've built them. You've studied some very interesting cultures that you wrote about in the book. If you had to teach a seminar or something on like what a culture is in the first place and then how to design one given what you do and who you are, and then how to, you know, make sure that people live by it.
Let me give you kind of like a small but like the probably the most important insight, which is from Boshito, the way of the warrior from the samurai. A culture is not a set of ideas. It's a set of actions. And so if you define your culture as a kind of set of ideas, integrity, do the right thing. We have each other's backs or any kind of like these ideas, they call them corporate values. It's actually just a bunch of if I can platitudes.
It doesn't mean anything. The culture has to be defined in terms of the exact behavior that you want that support that idea. What do you have to do to actually be that thing that you want it to be? And so, and it's the little things, you know, how responsive are you to your colleagues? What's the SLA on returning a Slack message or an email? Do you show up to meetings on time? And this is like not everybody has those ideas, but if you want that idea, you've got to manifest it through something else.
So like, we have an idea about like, you have to respect entrepreneurs. What is that behavior? Well, like, one, you can't ever be fucking late to a meeting with an entrepreneur. That is to fine people 10 dollars a minute in the beginning of the firm to reinforce it. And then you know, you have to get back to an entrepreneur. If you say no, like you have to say no, you have to explain why you're not investing. And you know, it has to be clear. And we're going to survey that entrepreneur after you say no to make sure that you said no and that they had a good experience.
So like, that's a behavior. If you try to make yourself look good by making an entrepreneur look bad, you're fired. So like, you get on X and say, oh, he's selling dollars for 85 cents. No, no, no, no. We're dream builders. We're not dream killers. Fuck that. Where, somebody wants to do something larger than themselves, build a company, you know, make the world a better place. We're for that. We're gonna give fuck what the idea is, you know, and or if Sequoia funded them or whatever, we'd love that. That's who we are.
And so the behavior is the culture is the actual thing that gets you the idea as opposed to the idea and then figure out how you're going to behave. And so that's probably the main thing on culture. Can you say more about the influence your dad had on you? You mentioned that lesson of nothing's fair. Her life isn't fair. Tell me about your dad. He was what's done as a red diaper baby. He, my grandparents were communists. Like, they went to secret meetings. They had cards.
My grandfather was fired during the McCarthy era from being a junior high school teacher, you know, for being a communist. And he grew up a communist and he started out. On the left, he was editor of a, there's very famous new left magazine called Grandparts Magazine, which he was editor of. And he, you know, was involved in the Black Panthers with Huey Newton and, you know, in the old conchapter, Eldridge Cleaver, and he sort of dropped out of politics and he re-emerged, I guess, probably eight years later on the right.
He really understood kind of the ills of communism and socialism, which helped me a lot. Like, one of the things that he said to me that always stuck with me, he's like, son, go to the library. Pick any book on socialism. There's hundreds of books. And in that book, I guarantee you, you will find page upon page, chapter upon chapter of how to divide the wealth. You will not find a single sentence on how to create how to make it.
And I was like, oh, wow. That's not like a very good system. I learned a lot about systems thinking from that, which, you know, ended up being, I'd say, very helpful to me as CEO. He wasn't like, you know, this, this new age father, he wasn't like, you know, in the old days, your father, like they wouldn't even talk to you until he gets to be like 12. And then you get these little snippets of wisdom.
And like one of the ones I actually put in the hard thing about hard things. But I had, you know, three kids. I was young. And I remember there's like 102 degrees. The air condition was broken. The kids were going crazy. Like one of them poured a hole, bottle Apple juice, like a gallon of apple juice into the ragged apple juice is steaming out of the carbon. I'm just sitting there looking like I was going to die. And my father looks at me and he goes, son, you know what's cheap? I said, what?
He goes, flowers, flowers are cheap. I said, okay. He said, you know what's expensive? I said, no, what? He said divorce. And you know, he had been married four times. As you look out today in the world, I'm curious what things are captivating you most. And maybe even like most inspiring you. You get, you've such an interesting perch. You get to see you so much.
Yeah. So what's going on in coding now is like quite phenomenal. Well, you know, like we kind of went through this period where like, okay, AI can write code. Cool. Okay, you can vibe code stuff with a lot of security calls fine. But I think over the break over the kind of winter break, it turned a corner where like really, really good programmers were going, whoa. Oh god.
This is this helps me. I just became a hundred times more productive. And I can't remember any kind of technology where like just all the sun you wake up and everything, the whole world just changed like that. And that's happening on a pretty regular basis, I would say. And then, you know, we spent a bunch of time with people in Hollywood who are using AI. I think AI will help you make movies both better and at much lower cost because you can do, you know, you can shoot a scene and then have the AI do a variation of that scene. That's very, very good. And so you don't have to do, you know, the really like if you're an actress, you have to shoot a scene like 15 or 20 times or something. It wouldn't be nice to shoot it three times. And then you just like take the pieces you like and make it what you want. So it's I think, it's a little underestimated as a tool for creatives, I think. And I think that's true in music too, you know, I was kind of a young person when hip hop started and the huge criticism was like, this is not music, they're just taking music and they're like remixing it and they're wrapping over it and it's a bunch of bullshit like it's a novelty. But it was postmodern art. And I think we're going to get into kind of post-postmodern art with like what people will be able to do with AI and music.
And that was like one of the most exciting times in music. Like the invention of the new art form is when it gets really exciting. What people in hip hop specific people have had the largest impact on you personally and how? Nas is a very good friend of mine. And he, he's definitely had a big impact just that the lens at which he sees the world is so different and interesting for me. So we're both like very big fans of Ra Kim who is kind of like the John Coltrane of Ra. And so Ra Kim had one of his first big songs with the song called My Melody. And Nas and I are listening to My Melody. And the first line is Turn Up the Bass Pull Up a Chair, Hand Out a Sagar. I'm letting knowledge be born. My name's R and so he puts it on, hands out a cigar and he pauses it and he goes Ben, why is he handing out a cigar? And I go, I don't know why. Then he plays the next line. I'm letting knowledge be born. He's like, it's a birthbin. He's passing out cigars at the birth of knowledge. And I was like, oh shit, it was like a thousand times. I never heard that. And I can't tell you how many times like he sees or hears something that's there that I don't see. So having somebody that I can talk to who has just like a completely different perspective of all things in life.
那段时间是音乐史上最令人兴奋的时期之一。新艺术形式的诞生总是特别激动人心。在嘻哈音乐中,哪些人对你个人产生了最大的影响?Nas 是我的好朋友,他对我的影响很大。他看世界的视角与众不同,对我来说非常有趣。我们俩都是 Ra Kim 的超级粉丝,他就像嘻哈界的约翰·柯川。Ra Kim 的第一首大热歌曲之一是《My Melody》。有一次,Nas 和我一起听这首歌,歌词开头是“调高低音,拉把椅子,递上一支雪茄。我正在传播知识。我叫 R。”他放了这段音乐,递给我一支雪茄,然后暂停音乐问我,“Ben,他为什么要递雪茄?”我回答说,“我不知道。”然后他播了下一句,“我正在传播知识。”他说,“这是一种诞生,他是在知识诞生时递雪茄。”我听了上千次这首歌都没注意到这一点,真是让我大吃一惊。Nas 总能注意到我没看见或没听到的东西,能和一个总是以完全不同视角看待事物的人交流,真是太好了。
And it was interesting, we did the coin based deal together. And he had called me like two weeks prior to us really kind of seeing that because he wanted to learn about Bitcoin. So I explained to him how it worked. And he was very interested in when I was talking to Chris Dixon, who was work on the deal. I was like telling me about the guys. And he's like, well, one of them Fred is like really into hip hop. I was like, okay. And so I brought Naso over to my, I was like, haven't come over to my house. There's a boxing match on Saturday. I had Nas come over and that's how we got that deal. But yeah, he's just like a big influence on me personally. And then he's such a, you know, I, you know, I, as a, whatever, as a leader and so forth, like storytelling is, and a writer is important to me. And I think he's one of the great storytellers of all times, you know, like just a super genius on that.
Is there a CEO comparable to Nas where, you know, there's this class of guys in the 90s where Jay-Z, you know, I'm not just the businessman, I'm a businessman. Yeah. And they're these just massive franchises that got born. These guys all became incredibly successful in the business world. And it felt more like industrialized almost, like the whole process, whereas not like even just his album that just came out is it feels, just like, it'll, it feels like it could have come out then or now. It's like this weird timeless quality. He still has that somehow. And like premier same thing. Yeah. Do you know anyone else like that in another domain? It seems like he's such a unique person relative to his peers. Maybe Jensen. Jensen has like this like very defined, you know, agree with her and not, but it's like this view of who he is, what the company is, and so forth. That's kind of gone across eras. But it's still the same thing, right?
Like it's not that it like it played in gaming. It played in Bitcoin, it plays an AI, but it, it's still in video. Like it's not, he never thought he had to change the name of the company. He's gotten better over the years. But in a weird sense, it never felt like he's trying to be current. So like not as never kind of feels like he's trying to write a hit.
Can you tell the story of the work you're doing with the Vegas police department? And I'm asking about this one because it's super interesting. But also because it feels like an interesting different kind of example of what the application of this constellation of new technologies might allow for in terms of improvement efficiencies, you know, it's just such an interesting case study.
A couple of things about the Las Vegas police force for intriguing to me. The biggest one was they were different than other police forces in the country because they're a big metropolitan area that's not run by the chief of police but run by the sheriff. And the reason that's important is the sheriff is an elected official and does not report to the mayor. So they never got caught in the big political movement and defund the police and they were the one of the only cities that didn't reduce the police budget or anything like that.
So they kind of stayed in tact and they're also interestingly the one or the one that I knew that never militarized and they do community policing and you can see it in the numbers. So the murder clearance rate in Las Vegas is the highest murder clearance rate, meaning they they solve the murder. 94% and you know, I think San Francisco is like 75% and then Chicago's like in the 30s and the national average is below 60.
And I asked them I said, you know, why why is your murder clearance rate so high? And the sheriff Kevin Mayhull said, Ben, you know, when somebody is murdered, there's always somebody who knows who did it. They just don't talk to the police. So but they talked to us because we're part of the community like they know us. And so it's like, wow, that's a great kind of environment to see if this new technology worked.
And I knew about all the public safety technology because we invested in through American dynamism. So I was like, like, we're going to become the highest tech police force in America, hopefully the world. And I'm just going to fund it. And so I bought, you know, we've got a drone program and we've got, you know, prepared 911 and we've got Flock Safety, you know, AI cameras.
If an emergency call, if a 911 call comes in or if a gunshot goes off, there will be a drone deployed in there within 90 seconds. And then that drone video feed will be in every police officer's phone in the vicinity like instantly. Since we started the program, I think crime is down over 50% and then, you know, shooting of suspects by police is down like close to 75%. But everybody's safer.
And I think this is the thing that that was the most surprising to me on the technology deployment is that so when you talk to the police, they go, look, the problem is the descriptions cause like half the violent confrontation. So I'm like, well, what do you mean? So somebody jacks a car. There's a baby in the back seat. We get a description of the car. It's 2004 Hyundai. That's blue.
Well, it's really a 2008 Hyundai that screened, but we pull a guy over in a 2004 Hyundai that's blue. And you know, that person has had bad experiences with the police. And you know, now he's got a gun in the car. And all of a sudden, we've got an incident and like an innocent citizen gets armed or police gets shot with AI camera.
We know that's the car. That's it. And we know there's a baby in the car. And so we're not sending one guy with a gun to see if that's the guy who we're sending a whole squad. And we're apprehending them safely. And so everything about like policing is inherently dangerous, but intelligence makes it dramatically safer.
And so I'm a huge believer in this technology for making everybody safer, you know, suspects, criminals, citizens, police, everybody. The other kind of, not going to affect is it's kind of put the pride back into policing. We used to have a big problem in Vegas where you know, because nobody wants to be a police officer, we were lowering the standard.
But now the standard is really high. So between the drone center, which is like super say to the art, and then you have these cyber trucks that look so like amazingly futuristic and cool driving around, like everybody wants to be a police now. And Las Vegas happens to have the highest concentration veterans in the country.
So plenty of like super qualified people to choose from. They'll want to be police. So that's all gone really well. The last question I ask everyone is the same. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? A mentor might have a fellow by the name of Ken Coleman, who was a big executive at Silicon Graphics.
And when I was, I guess a sophomore in college, I got an introduction into him and he gave me a job as a summer intern. And without that job, I don't know that I ever get to Silicon Valley or that whole thing. So I would say that's probably that that was the highest impact. Just he didn't have to do that thing that anybody did for me. It may interest you that that is the most common form of answer across 500 of the someone that like took a bet when they didn't need to.
Then pleasure to finally do this with you after a couple years of watching you and learning from you. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Patrick. You know how small advantage is compound over time that's true in investing and just as true in how you run your company. Your spending system is your capital allocation strategy. Ramp makes it smarter by default that are data that are decisions better economics over time. See how at ramp.com slash invest as your business grows, Vanta scales with you, automating compliance and giving you a single source of truth for security and risk.
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